Swing for the Virtual Fences - Google Problem Solving for Modern Merchants

If Internet retailers were
behind in the count, no one
would blame them.

They’re constantly thrown curveballs, yet
online merchants, just like successful hitters,
are confident, patient and step up to
the plate with proper mechanics.

“E-tailers” have no other option, but
to face the radical changes to consumer
consumption habits/demands, Google algorithm updates
and anything else pitched to them head on.

And while there are plenty of obstacles that concern
Internet retailers today, six of which are discussed below,
there are as many, if not more, opportunities that modern
merchants can leverage to generate traffic from search engines’
natural and paid results in order to win the digital
marketing game. After all, problems are only opportunities
in disguise.

Curveball: Hitting a Wall with CTRs

Swing Away: Advertisers are still investing in paid
search, because it works, by evidence of Kenshoo’s Q1
2013 report on global search advertising trends. The findings indicate global
search ad spend is up 15 percent. Global click-through rates
(CTRs) are also up 62 percent, year-over-year, so enterprises
with flat-lined CTRs should look at their own campaigns,
not paid search in general.

“The click-through rates [findings] was a big ‘aha’ moment
for me,” said Kenshoo Director of Marketing Research,
Josh Dreller. “Sometimes it feels like you hit a wall trying to
increase your CTRs, because you are relying
on searchers and users to click on your
ad. [These findings] mean marketers are
really working their ads. They are choosing
the right keywords and negative terms
and getting in front of the audiences that
will engage.”

Merchants who are not seeing their CTRs
improve should narrow their keywords to
the ones customers are responding to, utilize
Google’s ad extensions and build more
creative integration, such as between search
and social. The biggest mover in the latter is Google+, according
to Michael Gullaksen the senior vice president,
managing director of Covario, an enterprise search agency.

Curveball: No Way Out of Google+

Swing Away: There are multiple reasons why there is
no escaping Google+, but for merchants advertising with
Google, the top-two are sheer numbers (reports are showing
that Google+ is outpacing Twitter as the world’s number
two social network, behind Facebook) and
sophistication.

For example, Google+ endorsements can
support an AdWords campaign through social annotations.
When Google detects an active and verified Google+
page, these annotations will be shown when its system predicts
that a Google+ page will improve campaign performance.
Since merchants (and the rest of the Web) don’t
know how Google values this, it’s best to go all in with
Google+. Social annotations can help add a layer of credibility
to an ad, but if it increases visits to an incomplete
Google+ page, or one with incorrect or outdated information,
it could have the opposite effect.

These annotations
will be automatic under Enhanced Campaigns, so merchants
who do have active Google+ pages should ensure
their pages have verified URLs, the domains of their
Google page URLs match the domain of their ads’ URLs
and that their Google+ pages have recent, high-quality
posts and a significant number of followers, which Google
says is at least 100 for most businesses.

Curveball: Mandatory Enhanced Campaigns

Swing Away:The most recent change affecting e-merchants
is Google’s move toward Enhanced Campaigns. According
to an iProspect 2013 whitepaper on the subject,
mobile CPCs are projected to rise, as more advertisers
begin serving ads on smartphones (intentionally or not).
iProspect provides this solution, “Advertisers should review
their current smartphone strategy and examine how
they can replicate past successes via smartphone bid multipliers,
or set their multipliers to negative 100 percent if
they don’t want their ads to serve on smartphones.”

While this move by Google allows for ease-of campaign
execution, merchants should know that they
cannot segment the tablet marketplace with Enhanced
Campaigns, because this traffic is grouped into desktop
data. Gullaksen advises merchants to invest in an infrastructure
and experience (e.g. no flash) that is both desktop
and tablet-friendly, because they will not be able to
target and track by that device type, or more specifically,
browsers used on tablets.

Curveball: Google PLAs

Swing Away: Anytime something is free, and then you
are charged for it, there will be plenty of negative feedback,
as was the case with shopping PLAs, according to Gullaksen.
However, frequent reports are proving that PLAs increase
visibility and conversion rates.

Additionally, now that it’s a paid service, PLAs are creating
more insight into performance, conversions and ROIs.
Specifically, enshoo’s 2012 Global Online Retail Holiday
Shopping Report states that PLAs continue to generate
nearly 1.5 times the CTRs of regular text ads and convert 23
percent better.

Curveball: Content is King

Swing Away: With the rise of social
media and its integration with search, there
are plenty of earned media opportunities
that are available for Internet retailers today
that weren’t accessible to them in the past.
Marketers can use organic search efforts
(earned) to reach users and advertising to
push promotions. For example, Internet retailers
should use (or start) a blog to provide
the search engines with frequent fresh content
and give their consumers relevant information.
Additionally, by linking content
to a Google+ business page using rel=”publisher”
tag, Google will recognize a brands
G+ page as its official profile, which it will
give preference to in the SERPs.

Gullaksen advises that Pinterest is another
avenue for marketers to explore, because
it allows an inexpensive way to put
product images in front of users to drive
awareness and demand.

Curveball: Bad Merchants

Swing Away: In March 2013, Google’s Matt Cutts said,
“We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little
bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants, and
whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t
want low-quality experience merchants to be ranking in
the search results.”

What does this exactly mean for merchants and what
should they know and do to ensure they aren’t labeled
as such?

Industry experts, such as Dreller and Gullaksen, are in
consensus that merchants who can sit in a room with
Google and confidently show the company their strategies,
will have no issues.

“The thing to remember is that Google is very explicit
on their guidelines and bad practices,” said Kenshoo’s
Dreller. “They don’t want to ruin good campaigns and deincentivize
good marketers and good retailers.”

The game plan for all retailers should be to review and
follow Google’s search, social and advertising guidelines
and swing away.